One of the highlights (?) of the Republican debate Tuesday night didn't actually happen on the stage, but during a commercial break when a truly bizarre attack ad ran. The ad is like something out of "1984" or Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," showing a room full of robotic bureaucrats stamping "DENIED" on loan applications. This is supposed to portray the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which explains why these bureaucrats are working beneath huge, Soviet-like banners depicting Sen. Elizabeth Warren and CFPB director Richard Cordray.
But the ad does not disclose that the group sponsoring it is led by lobbyists for Navient, a student loan company that the CFPB is currently investigating for allegedly cheating student loan borrowers. […]
The American Action Network, the sponsor of the advertisement, is led by a team of lobbyists employed to beat back consumer protection regulations on behalf of industry clients. American Action Network board member Vin Weber is a lobbyist at Mercury LLC, where he is registered to work as a Navient lobbyist. On his registration forms, Weber says he specifically works on matters related to the CFPB.
Weber's colleague on the board, Tom Reynolds, is also a registered lobbyist for Navient through the law firm Nixon Peabody. And another American Action Network board member, Barry Jackson, works with Brownstein Hyatt Farber Shreck, a lobbying firm that serves a number of student loan and payday lending firms on issues relating to the CFPB.
Navient has been the subject of investigations "for at least two years by several federal and state authorities for allegedly overcharging borrowers and otherwise mistreating them in violation of the law." One of those authorities is the New York Department of Financial Services, one of the most feared watchdogs on Wall Street.
So, yes, Navient is in trouble from a lot of sources, but the easiest one to fight politically is the CFPB because it was Elizabeth Warren's idea, because it is an agency of the Obama White House and because Fox viewers are actually gullible enough to believe that the CFPB has the authority to deny anyone a loan application. (It doesn't.) It also doesn't have the authority that Carly Fiorina claimed in Tuesday's debate: "We've created something called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ... that's digging through hundreds of millions of YOUR credit records to (finger quote) detect fraud." That, of course, isn't how it works. Yeah, I know, Fiorina lied. Stop the presses.
What the CFPB has actually done in its five years of existence is recover more than $10 billion for consumers who have been cheated by financial services companies. You know, Consumer Protection, just like it says in the title.